Note 14 — Chapter V · THE SPREAD OF ISLAM AMONG THE CHRISTIANS OF SPAIN.

There is, however, one notable exception to this general good treatment and toleration, viz. the tribute of Christian children, who were forcibly taken from their parents at an early age and enrolled in the famous corps of Janissaries. Instituted by Urkhān in 1330, it formed for centuries the mainstay of the despotic power of the Turkish Sultans, and was kept alive by a regular contribution exacted every four years,14 when the officers of the Sultan visited the districts on which the tax was imposed, and made a selection from among the children about the age of seven. The Muhammadan legists attempted to apologise for this inhuman tribute by representing these children as the fifth of the spoil which the Qurʼān assigns to the sovereign,15 and they prescribed that the injunction against forcible conversion16 should be observed with regard to them also, although the tender age at which they were placed under the instruction of Muslim teachers must have made it practically of none effect.17 Christian Europe has always expressed its horror at such a barbarous tax, and travellers in the Turkish dominions have painted touching pictures of desolated homes and of parents weeping for the children torn from their arms. But when the corps was first instituted, its numbers were rapidly swelled by voluntary accessions from among the Christians themselves,18 and the circumstances under which this tribute was first imposed may go far to explain the apathy which the Greeks themselves appear to have exhibited. The whole country had been laid waste by war, and families were often in danger of perishing with hunger; the children who were thus adopted were in many cases orphans, who would otherwise have been left to perish; further, the custom so widely prevalent at that time of selling Christians as slaves may have made this tax appear less appalling than might have been expected. This custom has, moreover, been maintained to have been only a continuation of a similar usage that was in force under the Byzantine emperors.19 It has even been said that there was seldom any necessity of an appeal to force on the part of the officers who collected the appointed number of children, but rather that the parents were often eager to have their children enrolled in a service that secured for them in many cases a brilliant career, and under any circumstances a well-cared-for and comfortable existence, since these little captives were brought up and educated as if they were the Sultan’s own children.20 This institution appears in a less barbarous light if it be true that the parents could often redeem their children by a money payment.21 Metrophanes Kritopoulos, who was Patriarch of Constantinople and afterwards of Alexandria, writing in 1625, mentions various devices adopted by the Christians for escaping from the burden of this tax, e.g. they purchased Muhammadan boys and represented them to be Christians, or they bribed the collectors to take Christian boys who were of low birth or had been badly brought up or such as “deserved hanging.”22 Thomas Smith, among others, speaks of the possibility of buying off the children, so impressed: “Some of their parents, out of natural pity and out of a true sense of religion, that they may not be thus robbed of their children, who hereby lie under a necessity of renouncing their Christianity, compound for them at the rate of fifty or a hundred dollars, as they are able, or as they can work upon the covetousness of the Turks more or less.”23 The Christians of certain cities, such as Constantinople, and of towns and islands that had made this stipulation at the time of their submission to the Turks, or had purchased this privilege, were exempted from the operation of this cruel tax.24 These extenuating circumstances at the outset, and the ease with which men acquiesce in any established usage—though serving in no way as an excuse for so inhuman an institution—may help us to understand what a traveller in the seventeenth century calls the “unaccountable indifference”25 with which the Greeks seem to have fallen in with this demand of the new government, which so materially improved their condition.